Novelist as a Vocation(34)

Still, when it comes to writing novels, I’m able to maintain the mental toughness needed to sit at a desk for five hours each and every day. This mental toughness—or at least the greater part of it—isn’t something I was born with; it was acquired. I obtained this by consciously training myself. Take it a step further and I would say that, though it isn’t easy per se, anyone, as long as they make the effort, can achieve this to a certain extent. Naturally, just like physical strength, this isn’t something you need to compare to others or use to compete with them, but is the strength you need to maintain the way you yourself are now in the very best condition.

I’m not advocating becoming moralistic or stoic. There’s no particular direct relationship between becoming moralistic or stoic and being a great novelist. At least I don’t believe there probably is. All I’m doing is advocating something quite simple, and practical: namely, that it’s best to become more conscious of the physical side of things.

That way of thinking and living is at odds, perhaps, with the usual image people have of novelists. I’m gripped myself by a growing sense of anxiety as I say this—the sense that many people still expect novelists to conform to the classic image of people who lead a debauched life, ignore their family, pawn their wife’s kimono for money (perhaps an image that’s a bit out of date), get hooked on alcohol, or women, doing whatever pleases them—the antiestablishment writer who creates literature out of ruin and chaos. Or if not that, then the expectation that the writer be a man of action, the kind who takes part in the Spanish Civil War, pounding away at his typewriter as the shells whiz around him. I have the sense that no one is hoping that a writer lives in a quiet suburb, lives a healthy early-to-bed-early-to-rise lifestyle, goes jogging without fail every day, likes to make healthful vegetable salads, and holes up in his study for a set period every day to work. I have the anxious sense that all I’m doing is throwing a damper on people’s sense of the romantic.

Consider the case of Anthony Trollope. A novelist in nineteenth-century England, Trollope wrote many lengthy works and was quite popular at the time. He worked at the London post office and started writing novels mainly as a hobby, but then became successful as a writer, until he became a leading novelist of his day. Still, he kept his job at the post office. Every morning before work he got up early and wrote a fixed number of pages, and then would set off for work. Trollope was apparently an outstanding civil servant and achieved a high position in the British postal service. It’s said that the red mailboxes you see all over London are a legacy of his work in the postal service. (Up until then there were no such things as mailboxes.) He was unusually fond of his work at the post office, and no matter how busy he became as a writer he never considered quitting his day job. I imagine he was a bit of an eccentric.

He passed away in 1882 at the age of sixty-seven, and a posthumous autobiography was published that revealed for the first time how unromantic and exceedingly orderly his daily routine was. Up until then people didn’t know what sort of person Trollope was, but once the details of his life became known, critics and readers alike were aghast and discouraged, and his popularity and critical reputation as a novelist in England took a decided nosedive. For me, when I heard this story I thought, “Wow, what an amazing guy,” and was simply impressed, and respected Trollope all the more (I’ll admit to not having read any of his work, though); but his contemporaries reacted the totally opposite way. They were seriously upset that they’d been reading novels written by such a thoroughly boring man. Maybe ordinary people in nineteenth-century England had an idealized image of a novelist, or a novelist’s lifestyle, as unconventional. I get a little jumpy sometimes wondering if I’ll suffer the same fate as Trollope, seeing as how I also live this kind of ordinary life. Well, it’s a good thing, I guess, that in the twentieth century Trollope’s critical reputation has seen something of a reassessment…

Along the same lines, Franz Kafka wrote his works in the time between working at his job as a civil servant in an insurance company in Prague. He was by all accounts a very able, earnest official, and his colleagues all acknowledged how very capable he was. It was said that if he took a day off work, the company basically ground to a halt. Like Trollope, he never slacked off on his main job, and also was quite serious about writing (I get the sense, though, that he may have used the fact of having a full-time job as an excuse that kept the majority of his works incomplete); but Kafka’s case was different from Trollope’s in that his regular lifestyle was praised rather than disparaged. Where the difference lies is hard to say. Certainly there’s no accounting for people’s opinions sometimes.

At any rate, my apologies to all those, as far as novelists go, who are looking for an idealized image of the unconventional—and as I’ve said over and over, I’m only saying this as it applies to me—but practicing physical moderation is indispensable in order to keep on being a novelist.

I think chaos exists in everyone’s minds. Chaos is in my mind, and in yours as well. It’s not the sort of thing, though, that in daily life needs to be given form and openly shown to others. Not something you brag about, saying, “Hey, get a load of how huge the chaos is inside me,” or anything. If you want to come face-to-face with the chaos inside you, then be silent and descend, alone, to the depths of your consciousness. The chaos we need to face, the real chaos that’s worth coming face-to-face with, is found precisely there. It’s hiding right there, at your very feet.